Hello Friends,

It has been one year since I took up the reins as chair of this department. Our former chair, Dave Kieda, is now Dean of the Graduate School. It’s been an honor to work with such a superb and congenial faculty, skilled staff, and dedicated students. But it is also a big job. Thanks to the addition of our astronomy component, we have grown to almost forty faculty members, nearly 100 graduate students, and 300 undergraduate majors. As a consequence, we are bursting at the seams in both lab and office space and in budget. The department chair’s job naturally has its high and low points and its trials. A favorite high point is giving a deserving student a scholarship check - thanks to our donors, we are able to do this on occasion. Then there was a “trial by ice” Halloween 2013 when a liquid helium container in one of our James Fletcher Building labs began to malfunction - the pressure was rising out of control, so we had to evacuate for several hours until the vendor’s experts could deal with it safely.

Courtesy of Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. An artist’s conception of the measurement scale of the universe. Baryon acoustic oscillations are the tendency of galaxies and other matter to cluster in spheres, which originated as density waves traveling through the plasma of the early universe. The clustering is greatly exaggerated in this illustration. The radius of the spheres (white line) is the scale of a “standard ruler” allowing astronomers to determine, within one percent accuracy, the large-scale structure of the universe and how it has evolved.

Scale • The new understanding likely will shed light on the nature of dark energy - the force that is causing the universe to expand.

Astronomers have defined the scale of the universe to within one percent accuracy, allowing them to better understand the enigmatic nature of dark energy and its ability to accelerate the expansion of the cosmos.

This Hubble Space telescope image shows the gargantuan galaxy M60 in the center, and the ultracompact dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1 below it and to the right, and also enlarged as an inset. A new international study led by University of Utah astronomer Anil Seth and published in the journal Nature found that M60-UCD1 is the smallest known galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center, suggesting the dwarf galaxy originally was much larger but was stripped of its outer layers by gravity from galaxy M60 over billions of years. M60’s gravity also is pulling galaxy NGC4647, upper right, and the two eventually will collide. Photo Credit: NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute/European Space Agency

Many Black Holes May Hide in Dwarf Remnants of Stripped Galaxies

Sept. 17, 2014 – A University of Utah astronomer and his colleagues discovered that an ultracompact dwarf galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole – the smallest galaxy known to contain such a massive light-sucking object. The finding suggests huge black holes may be more common than previously believed.